Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Return of the Real Obama
WASHINGTON -- The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes -- naked of spending cuts -- passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed "principle" of fiscal "balance" by taking the lead on reducing spending. "Why," asked The Washington Post on the eve of the final "fiscal-cliff" agreement, "is the nation's leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?" Because he has no interest in them. He's a visionary, not an accountant. Sure, he'll pretend to care about deficits, especially while running for re-election. But now that he's past the post, he's free to be himself -- a committed big-government social-democrat.
One Cheer for the Cliff Deal
One cheer out of a potential three is all anyone can logically give the fiscal-cliff deal. On the day after the bargain was clinched, the stock market gave a 300-point cheer. So be it. In the short run, extending tax cuts up to $450,000 probably saved us from a recession. If all the tax cuts *had* expired, we'd have a $500 billion tax hike, plus marginal rate increases, and that would have sunk the economy. So I'm going to bet that the big stock rally was a sign of *relief* that the final deal wasn't worse. The final product was sort of a least-bad tax scenario. The top tax threshold got to $450,000. Capital gains and dividends were capped at 20 percent. And even the estate tax did better than feared, with a 40 percent rate off a $5 million exemption. Plus, all the tax rates were made permanent -- including the rate for the alternative minimum tax (AMT).
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Taking Up the Debt Ceiling War
Why conservatives must rally the nation against Obama's mission to take us over the bankruptcy cliff.
Borked
Most of us would be honored to have our name become a verb. Especially those of us in public life. But that is not how Judge Robert H. Bork got into the dictionary. He was "borked" when President Reagan nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court. No sooner had the announcement been made by the White House on July 1, 1987, than Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) raced to the Senate floor to denounce the distinguished judge and former Yale Law Professor. In Robert Bork's America, Kennedy roared, blacks would once again sit in the back of the bus, rogue police would break in our doors, and women would be forced to go to back alley butchers for abortions. On and on, Kennedy ranted, using every extreme and exaggerated charge he could employ, to tarnish the judge's reputation.
Waiting for the Sequel
The latest horror movie from Washington -- "The Fiscal Cliff" -- finally came to an exciting end in the early hours of 2013. But after two years did its climax -- more taxes, more spending and more chicken-livered can-kicking by our politicians -- really shock any of you over the age of six? Didn't think so. Spinning the budget deal as a last-minute victory for the American people, the White House and Congress are saying that all the actors knuckled down, did the right thing and created a compromise budget deal that kept the country from going over the fiscal cliff.
Bad Inventions
I am bored with politics, refuse to pay attention to the news and am watching only True Crime TV shows and Turner Classic Movies these days. With the Democrats controlling the Senate and presidency, nothing good can possibly come out of Washington for at least another two years. So I thought I'd start the new year with something useful, like a short list of bad inventions.
Guns and Piers Morgan
CNN's Piers Morgan writes that the pro-gun crowd's anger toward him stems from anti-British bias: "This gun debate is an ongoing war of verbal attrition in America -- and I'm just the latest target, the advantage to the gun lobbyists being that I'm British, a breed of human being who burned down the White House in 1814 and had to be forcefully deported en masse, as no American will ever be allowed to forget." Scads of "in-sourced" Brits appear on our telly without us Yanks calling for their deportation. Hell, we just let a Brit play Abe Lincoln. Fox's Stuart Varney seems to escape this anti-mother country xenophobia. Maybe, just maybe, it's the way Morgan -- as well as much of the guns-kill-people-crowd -- holds "debates" on the matter.
If Demography Is Destiny, Good News for Texas, D.C.
Demographics buffs get a special Christmas present every year courtesy of the Census Bureau: its annual estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This gives demographers a chance to see where the nation is growing and where it is not, and to get an idea of the destination of immigrants and of the flow of people into one set of states and out of another. Nationally, the Census Bureau estimates that the United States has grown from 308 million people when the Census was conducted in April 2010 to almost 313 million in July 2012, a rate of 1.7 percent. If that continues through the decade, the nation's population will rise at a lower rate but by a larger number in this decade than it did in 2000-2010.
In Politics, It Is the Economy, Stupid
WASHINGTON -- I wonder, as we begin 2013 and look forward to four more years of this insufferable poseur in the White House, where Sandra Fluke might be. Miss Fluke is the lady who made birth control a matter of national security, in particular her own personal supply of pills and God knows what else. Prior to her appearance on the national scene I always thought it was a male?s responsibility to supply condoms, as the occasion warranted. Yet Miss Fluke enlightened me. Actually she never told us what she used these items for. I suppose I am jumping to conclusions. She might be an artiste, and they may be part of her palette. There are all sorts of things birth control devices can be used for. At any rate, she brought birth control to the fore in American presidential elections at least four decades after they became a fixture in America. In that respect she made history.
More of the Same
Everything that everyone loathes about Washington was present in the "fiscal cliff" bill just passed by Congress. It is 153 pages long; most members probably hadn't read all of it before voting on it; it was delivered in the middle of the night; it was loaded with pork -- the mother's milk (to mix a metaphor) of politicians -- and while the country is already swamped with massive debt, it contains massive giveaways to satisfy interest groups and campaign contributors. Did I mention the bill raises taxes on top of the coming Obamacare taxes, but does nothing -- nothing -- to address the debt problem? As with previous congresses, this one (again) delayed the debt issue for two months and will have to face it again, along with what to do about the debt ceiling. Only expletives that can't be printed in a family newspaper accurately characterize this bunch, so I'll have to settle for pathetic, unprincipled and irresponsible.
Our Decadent Democracy
WASHINGTON -- Connoisseurs of democratic decadence can savor a variety of contemporary dystopias. Because familiarity breeds banality, Greece has become a boring horror. Japan, however, in its second generation of stagnation is fascinating. Once, Japan bestrode the world, jauntily buying Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach. Now Japanese buy more adult diapers than those for infants. America has its lowest birth rate since at least 1920 -- family formation and workforce participation (which last year hit a 30-year low) have declined in tandem. But it has an energy surplus, the government-produced overhang of housing inventory is shrinking and the average age of Americans' cars is an astonishing 10.8 years.
Beware Large Groups of People
I have known a great many terrific individuals in the course of my 72 years. Some of them have been teachers, some have even been lawyers. But once you stick people in a group, my advice is to watch your back and hang on to your wallet. Take the United Nations. Please, as Henny Youngman used to say about Mrs. Youngman. As you probably know by now, the U.N. recently voted to grant the Palestinians non-member state status. In reality, it doesn't mean much. But in this world, perception, more often than not, trumps reality. It so happens that the United States opposed the measure. But in spite of getting a great deal of money from us taxpayers, the Palestinians ignored our wishes. What's more, there were only eight nations that supported our position: Canada, Israel, the Czech Republic, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palou. There were 41 nations that abstained, who simply couldn't bring themselves to choose between what we wanted and what the blankety-blank Palestinians demanded. Among them were many of those we had presumed to be our allies: Australia, Germany, Poland, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
The Great New-Year Stampede
There is a new-year stampede developing that we have not seen for a long time. Gun stores are swamped with panicking customers. They are looking for handguns, semi-automatic rifles and as much ammunition as they can afford. But buyers are not just camouflaged hunters, conspiracy theorists and gun hoarders. Instead, many of those purchasing firearms and ammo are so-called ordinary people, convinced that this administration will soon begin to centrally register -- and then ban -- far more than assault rifles. There were probably lots of reasons why Adam Lanza shot 26 innocent children and adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. But so far the government and media are not focusing much on his prior obsessions with violent video games, on society's seeming inability to hospitalize the unstable, or on the crude violence peddled in Hollywood and through popular music that portrays shooting people as a sort of cheap fantasy without consequences.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
David Gregory's Props and Pomposity
The D.C. police investigation of NBC hotshot David Gregory for waving around an empty ammo magazine on "Meet the Press" easily proves two things. First, D.C.'s "ammunition control" laws are ridiculous. But more importantly, once again, we find the arrogance of the national press knows no boundaries. Let us stipulate that this kind of law is just plain stupid. Empty ammo magazines are less threatening than mosquitoes. The point is, however, that liberals like David Gregory (set ital) do (end ital) subscribe to this kind of idiotic law -- for everyone else. Was Gregory so ignorant that he didn't know he was breaking a D.C. law? Nope. We learned NBC contacted the D.C. police and asked for permission to wave the props, and the cops said no. Then Gregory did it anyway. So not only did he believe he was above the law, he broke it so he could produce maximum buzz for his Sunday show.
People Are Truly Good at Heart? Sadly, No
Eleven years ago, al-Qaeda terrorist Richard Reid tried to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 with a bomb hidden in his shoes. As a result, air travelers to this day must remove their shoes to pass through security at US airports. In 2006, terrorists plotted to destroy as many as 10 planes flying from London to North America using peroxide-based liquid explosives smuggled in their carry-on luggage. So passengers now must limit any liquids they carry through security checkpoints to minuscule containers sealed in clear plastic bags. On Christmas Day in 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit by means of an explosive device sewn into his underwear. The government's response: full-body X-ray scans to detect even contraband concealed in one's groin.
Cliffhanger
New Year's day 2013. Football games? No. Parades? No. Hangover cure? No. I spent the entire day watching the Chasing Classic Cars marathon on USA as background noise while focused on Twitter following the U.S. House Republicans wringing their hands over what to do about the Senate-passed bill to crawl back up the fiscal cliff. Without getting into the weeds about things like (according to CNN.com) extending the excise tax carry-over on rum produced in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands; a federal tax of which most is paid back to the islands, the big talking point in the Senate bill is increasing the income level on which Federal income tax rates will rise from the President's long-held position of $250,000 for a married couple filing jointly to $450,000 for couples.
Why the 2nd Amendment
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, said: "The British are not coming. ... We don't need all these guns to kill people." Lewis' vision, shared by many, represents a gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants. Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." By the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says "the representatives of the people"?
Obama's Thug America
Progressivism in America has always been a thuggish ideology. It rests on the notion that laws require no evidence to support their implementation, that intentions are all that matter and that those who oppose "change" of the sort progressives like are morally deficient. Progressivism requires Americans to separate off certain groups in American life as evil -- the rich ("greedy!"), gun owners ("hooligans!"), traditionally religious people ("sexists!"), Constitutional government advocates ("bigots!"). It requires that certain Americans be cast as good -- racial and ethnic minorities, low income earners and women ("victimized!"), irreligious people ("rationalists!") and big government advocates ("experts!"). Progressivism in America is actually regressivism. Progressivism sends us back to a time when philosophical differences were seen as rebellion against God-given monarchic authority. It sends us back to a time when the law of the community invariably outweighed the rights of the individual, rather than building government on the basis of protection of individual rights.